A weekly wrap-up on what’s going on within the Virtual World sphere and beyond! Click on any of the below titles to read the full story.

The future of virtual goods

How to write a business case for immersive tech investments

What makes a virtual environment immersive?

Blue Mars: An interview with Avatar Reality’s CEO, Jim Sink

Unisfair Survey Finds Social Networks As Key to Virtual Events

“Research into virtual worlds: call for proposals”

Poll: What do you think of the government experimenting with virtual worlds?

Political Commentator Visits Virtual World

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By Ed Heinbockel, President and CEO (Head Heretic), Visual Purple, LLC

I’m witnessing some interesting virtual world developments of late. Not a scientific study to be sure, but a real, on-the-ground reality check. Quite simply: The emperor has no clothes.

Real companies and organizations with real training budgets are making real evals of real VW solutions. What they’re learning is an anathema for many in the VW community.

So here is the deal… Collaboration, since the beginning the holy grail of virtual worlds, is taking a backseat to the realities of building real world training for today’s digital workforce.

It’s not lost on those who have built VW applications as to probably why the collaboration drum has been beat so loud, for so long. Think about it: what else can you do in a virtual world unless you have the technology to embed logics to faithfully drive story, objects, behaviors, experiences, etc???? Well, about all you could do is co-op your friends or colleagues to join in and have a social, I mean, collaborative experience. I know, this is heresy. But then again, I’ve always been a bit of a heretic.

Collaboration has its place to be sure, great examples are what you can accomplish in Qwaq, Forterra and some SL apps by Rivers Run Red. But when it comes to real, high fidelity VW training invoked in a browser being dished up from a remote LMS with demonstrable results, what I’m hearing today is “…collaboration with a fence around it would be fine down the road. But right now, budgets are tight and we like virtual worlds because they cost-effectively deliver a compelling training experience that plays to today’s gamer savvy workforce. And realistically, all my people are very busy, dispersed and scheduling them all to be in world at one time is nearly impossible.” Dovetailing with this is a pervasive non-tech company corporate fear that the training will largely become a social experience. Message received. Get good asynchronous training in the hands of people now and prove the efficacy of VWs for training and learning. THEN walk the collaborative path…baby steps, collaborative baby steps… oh, and don’t forget your emperor’s, er, avatar’s clothes!

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Situated Research recently posted a blog entry entitled “Study shows that virtual worlds can influence real-world decisions”. Hummm….really?!

“A group of scientists at Cambridge University has conducted a study that shows that associations in videogames transfer directly to the real world. A group of volunteers played a (rather basic, from the look of it) cycling game, where they would be given a slurp of fruit juice if a cyclist from their team passed them, but a slurp of salty tea if a rival cyclist passed them.

The scientists’ conclusion? “Whatever you’ve learned in the computer game does have an effect on how you behave toward the stimulus in the real world” says the leader of the study, Paul Fletcher. For those of you who play computer games on a regular basis, you’ll know that virtual worlds can be just as ‘real’ as the real world, but I suppose it’s nice to have that confirm by science.”

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A weekly wrap-up on what’s going on within the Virtual World sphere and beyond! Click on any of the below titles to read the full story.

Manpower Convenes Avatar Thought Leaders

United Way Dips into Virtual Fundraising

A Quick Peek at Blue Mars

NATO, Sweden, and the Problem of Security in Virtual Diplomacy

Virtual World Roadmap Survey Now Live

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Ever walk into Second Life and have a feeling of loneliness overcome you? No real feeling of being immersed (almost like walking in on a fantastic party location and not knowing a soul to talk to and mingle with). Depending on your personality you may feel a bit awkward and out of place…Yes, I know if Second Life were a ‘real’ physical place it would roughly be the size of Houston, Texas (but that still doesn’t make up for the fact of feeling lonely).

Coming into a new virtual world/ environment does sometimes present no real sense of presence/ or being for the avatar. The landscape can be gorgeous with interesting buildings and cool places to explore, but no clear path of where you should navigate exists and the environment is often devoid of others. Sure some locations in Second Life use the arrows to guide visitors but is it really enough? With little to no avatar interaction is the visitor drawn in enough to stay and participate in the virtual world? Would you stay?!

However, we are able to turn this bleak scenario around by immersing the participant from the point of entry to the virtual world. Now enter: Non-player characters (NPCs). They are there to guide the virtual world participant to learn and explore the virtual world space and to give the learner/ trainee tools to use and distinct and clear paths to explore. This essentially injects life with believable social interactions into otherwise lonely virtual worlds. Remember, when entering a virtual world for training/learning being social is not at the top of the list; however it is an important aspect to consider. Rather than leaving the trainee to their own devices to discover the virtual world all alone- why not pepper the environment with intelligent NPCs? I think it’s the ‘Second Life’ type of environment that scares some people off when virtual worlds are brought up as a solution for an organization’s training approach. But let’s not let Second Life’s sense of desertion lead to the ‘all virtual worlds have no interaction’ mentality.

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